.85 is released!

OK..my last post was a little ambitious - I was about a week off in my prediction of getting .85 of the XPS and OPC spec out.  More bureaucracy in getting things posted to ms.com then I can faithfully predict sometimes.  Printed copies distributed inside the team came in hot-pink covers this time (there is no story as to why that is, just that I said "lets go with hot pink" - GPMs get to make the big decisions).  Specs are posted, get them here.  You will also find a link to the .9 of the Windows Media Photo specification on this same page.

For all things changed and new - go to the xps blog.  Jesse has posted summaries of all the changes in the specs.  Hopefully you will notice that most of the changes are clarifications, not big changes.  We are essentially design complete, no big changes, no big changes coming.  And...the code is marching along right with the spec.  When Beta 2 ships - it will be a beautiful thing.  I can tell you that playing around with the latest builds of Vista it is quite and exciting thing.  Create documents, view, sign, rights-protect, fast - good looking, slick new UI in the viewer.  It's all coming together.  An important milestone of any Windows project is when you stop using the last version to get your work done.  The last XP machine in my office is gone - I switched it to Vista last week.  My desktops and laptop are all running Vista, I will never go back.  OK..back to XPS.

One thing we did is take the markup compatibility definition that was in the appendix of the OPC spec and create a separate specification for it.  That spec will be posted soon. We did this because markup compatibility can be used for more than XPS, so we separated it out.  We also hope to shortly post a suite of sample XPS documents.  As soon as they arrive I will mention it.

- Andy